Overbearing zoning and housing regulations are causing home prices to skyrocket in Utah, pricing many out of the housing market. You could say that potential homebuyers are “Zoned Out” from homeownership. Prosperity Utah’s “Zoned Out” initiative aims to reform zoning and other housing codes along the Wasatch front to allow the market, not government planners, to determine what housing needs are best for Utah. Removing government barriers will allow supply to meet demand, causing prices to fall and improving the quality of life for Utah’s residents.
Utah faces a housing shortage of 50,000 homes. This lack of supply is drastically increasing home prices in Utah and is projected to raise the cost of the average home to $730,000 over the next 24 years. The Kem C. Gardner Institute indicates that “zoning ordinances, in no small measure, control the supply of housing through land use, density, and design regulations.” These regulations, more than any other local policies, govern the annual supply of single-family and multifamily housing. They provide a powerful policy tool to increase the supply of housing.
Prosperity Utah is launching “Zoned Out” to work hand-in-hand with cities to reform their zoning ordinances and other housing regulations, increase the supply of housing units, and decrease the price of the average home in Utah, allowing more families to own a home in their community.
To make this vision a reality, Prosperity Utah will:
Identify: Prosperity Utah will research burdensome ordinances of 10 target cities in Utah and identify which ordinances do the most to restrict the housing supply. We will then craft recommendations for how those cities should reform their most egregious and restrictive codes.
Educate: Through events in targeted cities, billboards, radio, social media advertising, op-eds, and earned media, Prosperity Utah will educate the public on the need for local regulatory reform. Our goal is to create a statewide narrative that housing codes need to be reformed and that municipal leaders need to support reform efforts.
Persuade: By meeting directly with Mayors, City Council members, and municipal staff, Prosperity Utah will seek to persuade these decision-makers to reform their codes to decrease the cost of home building in their localities and increase the supply of housing.
Track Progress: Identifying ordinances, educating the public, and meeting with local officials is not enough. We need to follow up to make sure housing ordinances are actually reformed. Prosperity Utah will create a database of housing codes that need to be changed and track our progress in getting them changed. This will be critical to keeping the pressure on decision-makers until they do in fact reform these codes, ensuring that we are achieving our goals, and seeing our efforts through to completion. Once successful, we will scale our efforts to include additional cities.
Stay Up To Date
Your labor is your property. The tax burden today across all jurisdictions is higher than it’s ever been. This governmental confiscation of your property is far afield from the tenets of a free market, limited government economy. We recognize that governments need funding to operate, but its roles are defined and limited in our Constitution,…
You should be allowed to determine your own livelihood without onerous governmental regulation and coercion. Societies and individuals prosper when entrepreneurs are free to build, create, and discover without excessive regulations holding them back. Government has far too much say in how we can work and create enterprises. We seek to drastically reduce requirements related to…
The right to own property is fundamental to a free society and must be protected and expanded. Through ownership, families can break cycles of poverty and build intergenerational wealth that expands opportunities for future generations, regardless of background or any other distinction. We seek to achieve the highest percentage of property & business ownership in the…